Friends of Art History Visual Cultural Series: “Didactic Art in the Information Age”

Friday, February 8th, 2019 at 2:30 pm to 7:00 am

In-person event
412 St. Patrick’s Building (Carleton University Art Gallery), Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6

Still from Hito Steyerl, HOW NOT TO BE SEEN A Fucking Didactic Educational .Mov File (2013).

Friday, February 8^th, 2:30 p.m., 412 St. Patrick’s Building
Aubrey Anable, Assistant Professor, Film Studies, SSAC, Carleton University
“Didactic Art in the Information Age”

Living with an abundance of searchable information literally at our fingertips seems to produce two contradictory epistemologies: everything is obvious and knowable now and everything is too diffuse and complicated for individual comprehension. Digital technologies produce a confusion of scale. Data are compressed, made small, for dissemination through networks, but this litheness produces a simultaneous “too muchness,” information overload.

In light of this, this talk considers the function of didactic aesthetics in contemporary video art. Analyzing two examples—Herman Asselbergh’s Speech Act (2011) and Hito Steyerl’s How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013)—Anable suggests how didacticism is related to questions about the role of information, art, and critique in the present.